Willa Cather’s Death Comes For The Archbishop: Another Portrait of the American Frontier

I enjoyed Willa Cather's My Antonia so much (see my previous post), I immediately started reading her Death Comes For The Archbishop. They are completely unrelated to each other, except that they are both concerned with how people lived on the frontier of nineteenth-century America. Death Comes For The Archbishop is set in the mid-1800s in the newly acquired territory of New Mexico. A young Roman Catholic priest, Jean Marie Latour, has been named bishop to this enormous, wild, mostly lawless area of the Southwest. He sets up his base in the small settlement of Santa Fe.

From the title, one might think this is a mystery novel, but it is not that at all! Rather, it is the story of how two Roman Catholic missionaries from France serve various peoples with grace, sensitivity, and love. Latour's best friend, Father Joseph Vaillant, accompanies him in his new placement. They first met in seminary in Clermont, France, and became fast friends, despite being nearly polar opposites. Physically, Fr. Vaillant is short, unattractive, and full of restless energy. Fr. Latour is tall, handsome, graceful, and intellectual. Where there is a spiritual need, Vaillant wants to rush in to address it, while Latour tends to observe, take stock of the situation, and consider the long game.

Cather makes the point that these two approaches complement each other, and both are necessary for effective ministry (I owe this insight to Joel Miller's excellent review of Death Comes For The Archbishop on his Substack, Miller's Book Reviews). The ministry Latour and Vaillant are assigned is daunting, to say the least: a huge territory that encompasses most of what is now Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. There are villages of Catholics that have not seen a priest in years. Men and women have paired up without being married. Their children have not been baptized.

Another pressing issue is Father Martinez of Taos, a powerful and corrupt priest who refuses to recognize the authority of Bishop Latour. When Latour visits him, he flaunts his women and children and asserts that celibacy can no longer be enforced. He is also responsible for inciting a raid on the new American authorities, resulting in the brutal slaughter of several men and women by natives. As the famous Kit Carson relates to Latour:

Our Padre Martinez at Taos is an old scapegrace, if ever there was one; he's got children and grandchildren in almost every settlement around here. (Location 855, Standard Ebooks edition)

Martinez tries to set up a schismatic church, but rather than force the issue, as Vaillant urges, Latour chooses to let Martinez slowly lose influence and followers as the true Church reasserts itself in the region.

While reading Death Comes For The Archbishop, I was impressed with the efforts these French Catholics took to serve their parishioners. They traveled literally thousands of miles on horseback through some of the most inhospitable land on earth. Often, there were no roads, let alone any maps, and every trip was life-threatening. And yet, Latour's and Vaillant's love for their flock enabled them to effectively minister to a diocese that was thousands of square miles in size.

One of Latour's most impressive qualities is his ability to connect with wildly different groups of people. He relates to the lowliest Mexicans in his diocese, the wealthy landowners, and the various indigenous peoples like the Hopis and the Navajo. He forges deep friendships with members of all these constituencies. As far as the Native Americans go, he respects their traditions and doesn't try to make them "European." There is one fascinating chapter in which he and his Indian guide, Jacinto, are caught in a deadly snowstorm. Jacinto manages to reach shelter in a cave. There is something about the cave that immediately causes Latour much discomfort. Jacinto tells Latour he must never reveal that he has been in this cave. He sees Jacinto carefully fill in a hole in the wall from which a stench is issuing. Latour is aware of tales that Jacinto's tribe has offered human sacrifices to a "giant serpent" who lives in the mountain. However, once again, Latour doesn't press the issue, and we never learn just what it is that causes Latour his distress.

Vaillant feels called to go to believers in Arizona, and there is constant tension between Latour's desire to have his best friend nearby and allowing him to satisfy his calling. As the novel progresses, both men see the hand of God in the decisions they make. Early on, there's an interesting conversation between them about the Virgin of Guadalupe:

"Where there is great love there are always miracles," he [Latour] said at length. "One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see you as you really are, Joseph, I see you through my affection for you. The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always." (Location 572, Standard Ebooks edition)

Just like in My Antonia, Cather does a masterful job of describing the beauty of the Southwestern desert. She truly is a visual artist whose medium is words:

The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still - and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one's feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere anthills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky! (Location 224, Standard Ebooks edition)

As the title says, death does eventually come for Archbishop Latour, but not before we have an opportunity to reflect on a life well-lived. He served God and the Church to the best of his ability, and he left an extraordinary legacy in the wild expanse of Southwest America. I'm not a Roman Catholic, but this book made me profoundly grateful for the unsung heroes of that Church who risked everything to bring the Faith to the most inaccessible areas of the world. Cather's novel is a beautiful tribute to them.